Z was simply the fucking man…his s/t is so great that he ends each side with the greatest side closer in album history (“The French Inhaler” and “Desperadoes…”) and even on his lesser albums, he’d still be good for one or two of the best songs ever written. I consider “I’m too old to die young and too young to now” to be one of the most important lyrics in my life and that’s in fucking “Bed of Coals”, a shitty song. I don’t think a day goes by when I don’t find some useful application of a modified version of “I didn’t have to come to Maui to be treated like a jerk”.

I got to meet him a bunch of times and he was way too generous with his time (although he was probably shocked to have a teenage fan in the mid-to-late 1990s. He even told me that the Norman in the final line of “French Inhaler” was Mailer, a reference to the girl he wrote it about.

If you haven’t read “I’ll Sleep When I’m Dead” then get on it.